Hey I headed over to graphicall.org to look for an optimized build for a mac (intel) and I got lost… What does it means when the build is BF and CVS? Which would be the best one for faster renders? I’m running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.10 on an intel chip.
Thanks
BF means the official release and CVS is where Blender’s development is currently at. I’d stick with the BF release because the CVS might be unstable. CVS usually has newer features but still, it might create save files that don’t open with the official release.
Are there are optimized Mac builds? I didn’t think anyone had made any. SSE2/3 + multi-threaded OpenGL would be great.
Thing is, my older son made a try on his G5 PPC and noticed a few seconds faster rendering when choosing 8 threads though he has only 2 cpus… (guess it was on the official rendertest - http://www.eofw.org/bench/) Now Blender as a maximum of 8 threads to render with (but many other operations don’t seam to be particularly multithreaded - or maybe i’m missing some fixing somewhere deep inthe masses of preferences or other panels…). With the actual 8 core systems, it could be nice to have 16 or 32 threads ready in Blender. 1rst just to be used within a near futur in next generations of workstations and 2nd to, eventualy, boost the rendering on the actual 8 cores machines…
Of course, i’m no developper and i got no glimps of idea about the tremendous rewriting of Blenders code that could be!
I wish they would multithread the UI actually. Baking a texture would a good one to thread (or radiosity.)